The Bonsai Diary: meditative brushstrokes

Sometimes an idea seizes you and won't let you go. The Bonsai Diary is one of those ideas.

It started as a reply tweet:

It was just a stray daydream about something I care about a lot: expanding the narrative lens from the individual to the community (over space) or generations (over time). The bonsai, which can famously survive for hundreds of years, makes for a great metaphor. Into my head popped a matching mechanic, and that's when I got a little obsessed.

The core mechanic: trace an image of a tree using strokes of a pen or brush:

The natural fit for this kind of game is, of course, a solo journal. I started to imagine the player working deliberately and meditatively in the tradition of Chinese calligraphy or painting. 

A good solo journaling game needs motivation, though. It happened that I was just researching the perfect genre: solarpunk. I mean there's nothing more literally "solar" than a tree! Better still, I wanted a story that arced towards hope, whatever the tribulations along the way. So that became the story: a bonsai, passing from hand to hand, decade to decade, generation to generation.

As I layed out that story, I wanted to open the player up to speculation and wonder about the future. Even before I became a parent who imagines what kind of world my kids would grow up to inherit, I thought about the trees around me and wondered what world they would inhabit. Ultimately, I hope that's the kind of play this tiny journaling game would enable.

This is very much my first try at a solo journaling game, and as timing would have it, the first game of any type I've designed and actually published. It's rough; it's probably hard to use (as I'm reminded as I struggled to explain the core mechanic in this blog!); and I hardly know if anyone even wants this kind of experience. But this was one of those games that came from my soul, not any kind of "market analysis." I hope someone enjoys it.